Appel à contribution : “Fertile Bodies, Fragile Cities: Art, Demography, and Women in Plague-Stricken Renaissance Europe”, RSA, date limite le 1er août 2025

Type : Paper Panel

Session Abstract (Max. 300 words) : This panel honors the work of Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, whose pathbreaking studies on women, family structures, and demographic transformation in late medieval and Renaissance Tuscany continue to shape the field. This session explores how recurrent waves of plague and demographic collapse in Renaissance Italy in particular and Europe in general reframed female fertility as a civic resource and maternal bodies as vital instruments of urban survival.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, European cities witnessed repeated population shocks, particularly in Tuscany. These crises not only shaped political and economic life but also prompted new visual, devotional, and rhetorical formulations of fertility, motherhood, and female health. The works of art, textual representations, and material practices that emerged in this period illuminate how conceptions of women’s bodies were mobilized as reproductive engines in response to demographic instability. From images of the pregnant Madonna, Nativities, Visitations and Madonna and Child, to votive offerings for safe delivery and protective relics, visual culture played a central role in scripting both individual and collective responses to natality and loss.

The panel invites papers that investigate the intersection of female fertility, demographic anxieties, and artistic production in plague-era Italy and Europe. Topics may include—but are not limited to—iconographies of childbirth, the cult of the Virgin as intercessor in fertility and maternity, protective ritual objects, artistic commissions prompted by reproductive concerns, the role of midwives and healers, and documentary or visual traces of population discourse in the wake of mortality crises.

By centering female bodies and reproductive labor within both the demographic history and the visual culture of the Renaissance, this session pays tribute to Klapisch-Zuber’s enduring legacy and opens new conversations across the disciplines of art history, social history, and gender studies.

Disciplines (Select up to 3) : Art and Architecture ; Comparative Literature ; French Literature ; History ; Humanism ; Italian Literature ; Medicine and Science ; Religion ; Women and Gender

Organizer : Costanza Gislon Dopfel

Contact email : cgdopfel@gmail.com 

CFP Deadline : August 1, 2025

Source

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